Sitting at her kitchen table, in frustration I recounted my annoyance. My son's class had been given an assignment that had demanded his attention all weekend. The amount of work that it required was ridiculous! Chris had worked non-stop over the past two days to get it completed. When he handed it in that Monday morning, he was one of only a handful of students who had been able to finish this huge project on time. Since so few had been able to achieve this accomplishment, the teacher extended the due date by a couple of days to give more time to the rest of the class.
I was not happy! My son had dedicated his weekend to meeting this teacher's requirements. If the other students had not fulfilled her demands, well, that was their fault. Chris and the others who worked so hard over the past two days should have at very least been credited with something extra as a recognition of their efforts. But no. Nothing. Their reward was a weekend without any fun, and now it seemed like it did not even matter. Unfair. My son voiced no complaint, but his mother was quite displeased!
I finished my tirade, and my sweet friend and accountability partner, with whom I met every Monday to share life and pray together, looked at me with empathy, but simply uttered one word, "Grace". I still remember my feeling at that exact moment. Don't you hate it when you want to remain angry about an injustice, but someone points out a truth you really would rather avoid hearing. I knew she was right. I was forgetting grace, and all the ways the Lord had lavished it so freely on me. I wanted these other classmates to be punished in some way, or my son credited for his achievement, but there was neither ramification or recognition.
In many ways, I was Jonah. I longed to see the delinquent get disciplined. Jonah saw the wickedness of the people of Nineveh and he did not want to announce a message of God's judgment against the city. Being warned of approaching doom, the prophet felt confident the people would repent and be saved and he wanted them to experience God's wrath, not His forgiveness.
I know I have mentioned this before, but we can really struggle with God's grace, not for ourselves, but for others. It appears at times that evil gets excused. We want to see the Lord's retribution extended, not His compassion. I am not talking about a school assignment any more, but about sin being addressed. When those feelings arise, we are exhibiting great forgetfulness. We are diminishing our sin, which in comparison in our minds, is so much less. Yet, our sin was also responsible to Christ's death on the cross. In our pride we are considering ourselves more deserving of grace than others, but the hand on the hammer of each piercing nail belongs to every one of us. We are not worthy of the grace given freely to us.
Jonah is not a story about a big fish, a reluctant prophet, or second chances. Jonah is an account of the character of our great and loving God who is "a merciful and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love...eager to turn back from destroying people." (Jonah 4:2) In the pages of Jonah our heart's tendency to vengeance is unveiled, and God's heart of mercy is revealed. May we not forget the compassion and mercy that reached down to us and let us consider the sensitivity of our hearts towards all the harboured hatred God is asking us to surrender.
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